Pepsi Brings Super Bowl Halftime Flash to Champions League Kick Off Show

When PepsiCo ended its decade-long sponsorship of the Super Bowl Halftime Show last year, the food and beverage giant leaned into football’s global cousin soccer to make a cultural splash, taking its learnings from the halftime show to other parts of the world.

The UEFA Champions League (UCL) final, considered the biggest game in club football, was played in Istanbul earlier this month. The first-of-its-kind PepsiCo Kick Off Show featured Brazilian superstar Anitta and Burna Boy as headliners. (As for the game, Manchester City was victorious over Inter Milan.)

Viewership dwarves that of the Super Bowl, with this year’s final expected to be around 450 million people. The 2023 Super Bowl averaged 115 million viewers, the most ever.

A few days after the game, PepsiCo announced a three-year renewal of the partnership, which originally began in 2015.

“Pepsi knows, more than most brands, that they have the power to positively, and potentially negatively, move culture,” said Dan Gardner, co-founder and chairman of digital creative agency Code and Theory. “And there are few larger positive global cultural moments than UEFA matches.”

For PepsiCo it’s about being able to go deeper and actually tell different stories.

Mark Kirkham, svp and CMO of international beverages, PepsiCo

“Like any partnership or sponsorship, you need to evolve, and I think the whole industry is changing,” explained Mark Kirkham, svp and CMO of international beverages at PepsiCo. “It’s no longer just about LEDs and impressions. It’s about the value you create and how you turn the sponsorship into a true brand-building partnership.”

Part of that evolution saw the Kick Off Show livestreamed on TikTok for the first time. Global singing stars and caffeinated performances have replaced DJs and smaller-scale activations. “You can see the production value has increased,” he said.

“It was informed not just by the Super Bowl but a lot of the things that we’ve done as PepsiCo in music over the years,” he said. “We use the Super Bowl as a kind of seed of inspiration to ask, ‘How do we get to there?’ And I think we’re getting there.”

Other PepsiCo brands such as Lay’s and Gatorade will also be featured going forward, with the aim of creating a “two-way dialogue” between global soccer fans and PepsiCo’s brands, especially in markets where interest in the sport is on the rise such as the U.S. and Middle East. PepsiCo products are found in more than 200 countries and territories. The company generated more than $86 billion in net revenue last year.

Kirkham explained the decision to end the NFL partnership was not because Pepsi didn’t care about football, but rather because “we can do different things.”

“One of the reasons that we decided to do this with UEFA was: ‘How do you bring more entertainment to football?’ And it’s not easy because football fans, they’re passionate about the game,” said Kirkham, who has been with the partnership since its inception in 2015.

To build up to the show, a three-month TikTok competition featuring Brazilian soccer player and Pepsi brand partner Vinicius Junior encouraged consumers to share videos of their ball control skills, with winners from around the world performing during the Kick Off Show.

A TV campaign also ran in his native Brazil featuring the player tied to Pepsi’s UCL sponsorship.

“Data is at the heart of it,” explained Kirkham. PepsiCo and UEFA are sharing data and integrating insights to reach more consumers and fans.

“If you think about how many fans UEFA has, and you think about how many fans we have, and you bring those two together—for UEFA it’s a great opportunity to expand audiences, and for PepsiCo it’s about being able to go deeper and actually tell different stories,” he said.

PepsiCo will continue digital and social activations for its sustainability and regenerative farming initiative PepsiCo Positive (pep+). Reusable cups and returnable bottles will be introduced at games, and influencers will educate fans on recycling.

Market expansion will be another key element, especially as the European competition will grow to include another four teams (totaling 36) in the 2024-25 season. Audiences in the U.S., Africa and Middle East are seen as “a huge opportunity” for UCL.

In the U.S., PepsiCo and UEFA’s grassroots soccer program, Team of Champions, is meant to create transformational change for Hispanic and Black youth, as well as bring more women into the sport. It is funded through a $1 million commitment.

Analyzing the partnership

According to sport data research company Horizm, which reviewed the UCL’s associated brands, Pepsi commanded the highest engagement rate of all partners with 9.24%, followed by Adidas at 8.63%. Pepsi would also generate a digital value of 273,000 euros, in comparison to sister brand Lay’s which generated 230,000 euros, despite the latter posting more times through its owned social media.

“Despite PepsiCo (Pepsi and Lay’s) not activating the most compared to other partners such as PlayStation and FedEx, their dominance in engagement has ultimately proved effective in terms of generating value from the partnership,” said Luis Viveiros, chief operating officer for Horizm. “This is highlighted by PlayStation, who despite activating on 200+ occasions more than PepsiCo only saw an engagement rate of 5.27%, compared to Pepsi’s 9.24% and Lay’s 5.93%.”

Meanwhile, research from Brandwatch for Adweek discovered that out of 12.6 million social media mentions of “Pepsi” since Jan. 1, 2020, there were 34,000 that also contained Champions League or UEFA. That is 1 in every 362.1 messages about Pepsi focused on this sports sponsorship.

Conversations containing both mentions of “Champions League” and “Pepsi” were found to be positive across 77.59% of posts, with “joy” accounting for 63% of all emotion-identified mentions.

“As UEFA looks to take its league to another level, Pepsi will look to capitalize on those (cultural) moments using the 10 years of learnings from sponsoring the National Football League and its halftime show,” added Code and Theory’s Gardner. “It will be particularly interesting to see how they activate and drive fan engagement the next three years by leveraging emerging technologies to drive conversations about sport, fandom and culture.”